What’s Your Nude: A Campaign For Brown Bras

Ladies. What color is your bra? Black, white, red….nude? We see this nude, or flesh, color in many places: lingerie, pantyhose, bandages, but this color only represents what some people look like in the nude.

Tara Raines is a black woman who has started a campaign called What’s Your Nude, to encourage lingerie manufacturers to make “nude” bras in more than just one shade.

“If I go to buy a bra, there are lots and lots and lots of bras in kind of that nude, sun tan-ny, color. Women have to chose between black, white and nude and the nude that is available isn’t my nude.”

The What’s your Nude Facebook page has gotten over 3,000 likes, and Tara encourages people to contact the stores where they buy their bras, and ask them to stock darker brown colors.

“I found out, when I started this campaign, that my mom, and aunts, and several other women have been dying nude colored bras brown. They’ve either been getting dye from the store or they’ve been using tea bags. I was kind of appalled, because when I started this campaign, and I started talking to family members, they were like ‘No no no, Tara! You’re just supposed to dye your bras!’ It was kind of like, this is just what you do.”

I was in the bandage aisle at the drug store recently, and realized that their flesh colored Band-Aids only work if you’re the same color as a Barbie doll.

“It’s Band-Aids, it’s lingerie, it’s shoes. Just in general, you know, people don’t look the same. I know it would be difficult for manufacturers to make things that look like every individual person, but put forth a little more effort and try and include more people in what you call ‘flesh’ and ‘nude.'”

The one place where nude and flesh colors have recently taken on some diversity is in boxes of crayons.

“Crayola actually just released a multicultural box of crayons. They’re all called ‘Flesh’ and it’s all different colors. It’s kind of a rainbow of browns and tans and peaches. It’s really nice that the crayon industry can recognize this but the clothing industry can’t.”